Tuesday, 19 August 2008

Fat Rascals

The past few days have been fairly busy sorting things out from out holiday and also trying to sort out the whole house after builders laid a lovely new floor on our whole bottom floor whilst we were away. The view from the bottom terrace!

As I said previously, we had a lovely holiday relaxing, enjoying the views from one of the suntrap terraces as above, or just chilling out by the pool with a good book – but some days we did go out and on one in particular we drove down about 2hours to the famous Alhambra gardens on the mountains beside Grenada.A view over Grenada old town (which we visited on my Dad's birthday!) from the Alhambra.

The gardens were beautiful and we did have a nice time looking round the various palaces dotted around the gardens. As it was my Mum’s birthday we ate at restaurant called the San Francisco Parador for a birthday lunch – I can report that some parts were good (my orange chocolate ice cream cake!) other parts were very disappointing (a surprise starter soup where we couldn’t quite work out what the flavour was). We didn’t see everywhere because that day temperatures were around 38’C-40’C and we were desperate to get back to the icy pool! Me in the Alhambra!

Today I made Fat Rascals! I was going to help make birthday cake for my Daddy but the tins are still in storage so that is tomorrows project. These Fat Rascals, however, certainly did not disappoint! They are a cross between a scone and a rock cake and the idea originated in Yorkshire where the recipe was a simple dough with currants. I have watched my Mum make these before (and enjoyed the end result!) so decided to have a go myself. It is a recipe from the Waitrose website, and these cakes are served at Betty’s tearooms in York. They worked a treat. The idea is to make about 6 huge scones and drop them in a “rascally fashion” onto the baking tray. The method is rather similar to the Welsh Cakes I made.

I didn’t have some of the exact ingredients and the weather is so awful I wasn’t eager to go out so I made some easy substitutions – which as usual are in pink with the recipe. Very good results – I would definitely recommend these.